Anthony Browne

Anthony Browne is Policy Director to the Mayor of London.

Browne holds a degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University. He is married with two children and lives in North London.

1988-89 Booz Allen Hamilton

Browne worked as a Business analyst for management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton.

1989-92

Browne worked in various media jobs, including diarist for the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column and producer for television production company Uden Associates.

1992-97 BBC

From 1992 to 1997 Browne worked for BBC TV and Radio news, including working on the Money Programme and Business Breakfast. he was promoted to become business reporter, economics reporter and acting economics correspondent for main TV and Radio programmes, including the Today programme, World at One, One O'Clock and Nine O'Clock News.

1997-2002 Observer

From 1997 to 2002, Browne worked at the Observer newspaper as economics correspondent, deputy business editor, health editor and environment editor.

2002-2007 Times

From 2002 to 2007, Browne worked at The Times newspaper as environment editor, Brussels correspondent, and chief political correspondent.

During his time at the Times, Browne became embroiled in controversy over his comments on VDare, a an anti-immigration US web forum, affiliated to the Center for American Unity.

In a 2002 Times article he wrote:

The only political party of which I have been a member is Labour, and the danger of giving encouragement to the racist British National Party is a strong reason to stay silent. But what is happening now is so extreme and so damaging, and the determination of pro-immigrationists to suppress debate and smear critics so fearsome, that silence is no longer an option.

He subsequently wrote about the article on VDARE:

It was bubbling around inside my head making me toss and turn in the small hours, and then at 4 A.M. it exploded out in 2,500 words: a cri de coeur about what uncontrolled immigration is doing to Britain, and the almost ruthless determination of the pro-immigrationists to distort facts, smear opponents and stifle debate. Having researched the article for three months for a pamphlet, the facts just poured out of my fingertips.

In a January 2003 VDARE article Browne wrote:

It isn’t every day that the interior minister of a mature western democracy publicly announces that his policies are leading to the collapse of social order and uncontrollable widespread communal violence, things more usually associated with places like Gujarat (and northern Nigeria.)

But last week David Blunkett, Britain’s Home Secretary, warned that society is “like a coiled spring” where the tensions and frustrations could spill over into “the disintegration of community relations and social cohesion,” with such widespread vigilantism that Britain could “tip into a situation we could not control.”

VDARE's James Fulford said of this piece: "This one was actually an article we commissioned and paid for, the links, et cetera, added by me, and with some editing by Peter Brimelow, as usual." The article was also posted at David Horowitz's Frontpagemag.

Browne was also criticised over an August 2005 article which stated:

The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain’s Left. The wacko Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the Muslim Association of Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting group, to form the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George Galloway created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won a seat in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.

Browne had been the Times' chief political correspondent for less than a year when he left to join Policy Exchange.

2007-08 Policy Exchange

From 2007 to 2008, Browne worked as Director of the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange.. According to ConservativeHome's ToryDiary "During his time at PX there was a doubling of staff numbers but a concern that the think tank became too close to Project Cameron."

2008 GLA

Browne was appointed as Policy Director to the Mayor of London on 21 July. The Guardian remarked: "Browne's appointment – the fourth from Policy Exchange to get a top job in the Tory party – marks a further high watermark in the influence of Policy Exchange on future Tory policy.

Affiliations

• Policy Exchange
• New Culture Forum
• Civitas

External links

• Anthony Browne - Policy Exchange profile

• Arun Kundnani the editor of Race & Class in a (2008) essay " How are thinktanks shaping the political agenda on Muslims in Britain? argues that Policy Exchange, the Social Affairs Unit and the Centre for Social Cohesion are driving the political agenda on Muslims in Britain while think tanks on the left are largely silent on the matter.

There is also a section in the essay which puts forward the idea of a reviving or recasting of the cold war:

What Browne's, Moore's and Gove's comments illustrate is the attempt to justify illberal policies in the name of defending 'liberal' western values against an alien 'totalitarian' threat. This is the paradoxical project that is now the major theme of centre-Right thinking on multiculturalism and the 'war on terror'. Indeed, the debate on multiculturalism has become a part of what many regard as a new 'cultural' cold war to promote a 'moderate' (i.e. pro-western) Islam across the globe - and particularly in Europe. This is a model that has been endorsed by Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has spoken of a new cold war against 'Muslim extremism', fought through the 'soft power' of cultural influence. The role of thinktanks would then not only be to supply political parties with policy suggestions but also to popularise the idea of 'Islamism' as an existential threat to the West that requires a hardline, Cold War-style response. As Dean Godson, a research director at PX who has strong links to well-known Washington neoconservatives, wrote in 2006: 'During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.'

It also adds that:

Encounter, of course, was covertly funded by the CIA. But Godson's suggestion has been taken up with the launch of Standpoint magazine, published by another thinktank, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU). Its editor Daniel Johnson explicitly sees Standpoint as a 21st-century version of Encounter, except with Islamism replacing communism as the threat to western civilisation. By uniting around the formula of the 'defence of the liberal West against the Islamists', the magazine has been able to incorporate pro-Iraq war 'liberal' writers, such as Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, with neoconservatives. Michael Gove serves on the magazine's advisory board, as does Gertrude Himmelfarb (one of Gordon Brown's favourite historians and wife and mother of the leading US neoconservatives Irving and William Kristol).

The references of the essay contain links to some of the debate over other think tanks', such as [Demos] attitude to aspects of the debate:

Martin Bright, 'Hamas at Olympia', New Statesman (10 July 2008). Nick Cohen, 'Demos and IslamExpo', Harry's Place (16 July 2008).

The Social Affairs Unit contains two former members of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, Antonio Martino and John O’Sullivan, which had strong ties to both the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Information Research Department and Encounter.